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Dad’s coochy-coos leave baby guessing

By Duncan Graham-Rowe

WOMEN really are better at baby talk than men. When talking in the coochy-coo baby-speak that parents often use with their infants, mothers’ utterances are less ambiguous than fathers’. And though it is practically impossible to know what babies make of it all, this suggests that infants may find their mothers easier to understand.

We know that babies pick up on the “affect” or emotional content of speech rather than the actual words, says Gerald McRoberts, a psychologist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. But it is still unclear precisely how adults use various acoustic properties in their voice, such as rhythm, pitch and stress, to communicate different meanings …